This invention relates to instructional writing paper for dysgraphic children, i.e., those having unusual difficulty in producing legible handwriting because of perceptual impairment.
The use of lined paper as an aid in teaching young children to write legibly is common practice in kindergarten and in the lower grades. Various kinds of such lined paper have heretofore been devised, including triple-lines and bands defining spacial and height guidance for the various elements of upper and lower case letters, whether manuscript or cursive. These bands and guidelines, some of which have been variously colored to more obviously define the spaces in which the instructional writing is to be performed, have proved to be of great value in the instruction and learning of normal children. Typical among such instructional writing papers heretofore devised is the writing readiness paper described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,638,332 to Jones. Such known instructional writing papers, however, have all been directed to young children of normal intelligence and perceptual abilities, and have been found to be only of limited benefit as an instructional aid in the teaching of manuscript and cursive writing to perceptually impaired children. Thus, I have found that the principal difficulty in teaching writing skills to dysgraphic children is their comparative inability to bridge the gap between writing within the color bands and writing between the guidelines defining the color bands without color or without contrasting colors. In other words, although vivid color contrast lines and bands are of some aid in developing writing skills in the perceptually impaired, dysgraphic or minimally motivated children, the improvement in beginning skills thereby learned do not carry over well to writing between guidelines and bands without the contrasting color bands. The bands are also limited in the number of colors and repetition of sequence, therefore, eliminating the confusion encountered on regular paper with its varying instructional lines and colors.
It is, accordingly, the principal object of my invention to provide a novel and improved system of instructional writing paper that obviates the above-described deficiencies in instructional writing papers heretofore devised, and which is particularly well suited to the teaching of writing skills to children who have problems with sequential memory, visual motor integration, visual discrimination, spacial recognition and placement, foreground-background confusion, and the like perceptual impairment.
A more particular object of the invention is to provide a system of instructional writing paper for perceptually impaired children wherein the stripes of contrasting colors in a plurality of sets of two-striped bands are of gradated intensity from strong contrasting colors through weak color contrast or intensity and finally to complete fade-out of color, whereby the disruptive gap in instructional guidance is obviated while advancing from writing with the aid of the color stripes to writing between the guidelines without distinguishing color stripes. Combined with the concept of gradated color intensity from vivid to complete fade-out of the color band stripes, is graduation of the width of the striped bands or the lines defining these striped bands from large to small, and graduation of the spacing between the bands from large to small, these various graduations being directed, generally, towards greater difficulty in use. Various combinations of color intensity, band and stripe width, and band spacing are thus available for successive use as the child progresses in writing skills. The combinative use of these graduated features can be varied from child to child to best accommodate his or her particular perceptual difficulties during the learning process.
Other objects, features and advantages of the invention will be apparent from the following description when read with reference to the accompanying drawings.